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Self-Expression
Mitchell S. Green presents a systematic philosophical study of self-expression - a pervasive phenomenon of the everyday life of humans and other species, which has received scant attention in its own right. He explores the ways in which self-expression reveals our states of thought, feeling, and experience, and he defends striking new theses concerning a wide range of fascinating our ability to perceive emotion in others, artistic expression, empathy, expressive language, meaning, facial expression, and speech acts. He draws on insights from evolutionary game theory, ethology, the philosophy of language, social psychology, pragmatics, aesthetics, and neuroscience to present a stimulating and accessible interdisciplinary work.
- GenresPhilosophy
242 pages, Hardcover
First published November 1, 2007
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June 5, 2023
Green provides a marvelously novel and compelling theory of communicative meaning, or what we get across to one another regarding our inner states (e.g., beliefs, desires, intentions), which turns out to be based in the expression of emotions. It is marvelous for a couple of reasons. One is that this is a prime example of a work in the philosophy of mind that is inspired by important findings of experimental sciences (in this case, particularly ethology, comparative psychology, and evolutionary biology), and moreover uses these findings in its arguments - Green both cares about the empirical plausibility of a philosophical theory about the mind, and shows how his theory is indeed thus plausible. Moreover, this work shows both the phylogenetic antecedents and relatives of this emotional meaning, and its extensions, in its human iteration, through our unique linguistic capabilities. While semantic meaning differs from this emotional meaning, the latter is at its core.
Let me briefly summarize the chapters. In chapter 1 "The significance of self-expression" Green introduces the philosophical puzzles that motivate his theory. First is the debate on how we can know one another's inner states on the basis of only observable behavior. Second is the lack of inquiry into expressive dimensions of communication by philosophers of language; only pragmatics sometimes goes into this. Third is the role of expressiveness in ethics and aesthetics; it's been relegated to being a matter of thinking ascribing the qualities of being good or bad to things in the world, but this distorts what human expressiveness as a phenomenon may be. Green also introduces the contours of his theory: he is inspired by theories in evolutionary biology about the use of signals in nature, as a consequence of natural selection. Bright colors on frogs may signal poisonousness to other species, and greater flamboyance of peacock feathers may signal fitness to peahens. Many of these signals cannot be faked, and those which can be faked often can only be so at the cost of extreme difficulty or self-handicapping.
We are to understand our human ways of expressing ourselves (e.g., crying, speaking, writing a poem, making music) as signals, albeit particularly elaborate and causally involved ones. This account stands in contrast to two paradigms. First is "the encoding model." On this, communication is a matter of encoding your ideas into a medium and sending it to me, which I decode and thereby access your meaning. A preliminary issue of this is we communicate much more than we say. On another paradigm "the inferential model" you provide me evidence of what inner state you have, and I'll draw inferences from this evidence to your inner state. A debate out there is whether one model should be understood as more fundamental than the other. Green argues that both models presuppose that the aim of communication is to make clear to others one's inner state; but this seems wrong. Communication may equally be characterized as having the aim of letting one another find out more about the world. Green proposes that the point of communication may be understood as showing how one sees something, or the aspects of something that are particularly salient to oneself. Green calls this the "extended senses model" (while he does not cite Bernard Williams, Williams's picture of communication is just this, and moreover he offers very interesting ideas to support it in Truth and Truthfulness). To put it a bit hyperbolically, by virtue of one's membership in a group, one gains access to all that others in the group see and feel. We'll communicate only that which we deem to be important for others to know, and we communicate in order to gain information about these important things. Green will use this extended senses model to elaborate upon the signaling model as found in evolutionary biology and arrive at a picture that captures the nature of the meaning found in human communication.
In chapter 2 "Expression delineated" Green defines self-expression as he uses it in this book, and distinguishes it from other related senses of expression. To put it briefly, self-expression is a matter of expressing one's inner state (e.g., emotional, cognitive, or experiential states), where expression either involves an intention to show this state, or does not but is a conventional or natural device for showing that state (where conventional and natural devices are to be defined in further chapters). In chapter 3 "Showing and meaning" Green reviews and criticizes Grice's theory of conversational implicature and his distinction between speaker meaning (a.k.a., non-natural meaning) and natural meaning. Green will replace it with his theory of "showing," of which there are three varieties: showing-that (whose object is a proposition), showing-O (where O is a perceptible object), and showing-how (which is a matter of illuminating certain aspects of a state of affairs). Grice is wrong, basically, because communication does not require the elaborate, nested sorts of intentions which he claims it does (i.e., the intention that in performing a communicative act the listener will recognize one's intention to perform this as a communicative act, along with one's intention to communicate the particular proposition that one does.) Instead, Green argues, communicative meaning should be seen as a matter of signaling and handicapping oneself (in the evolutionary biologist's sense), which he'll expand upon in further chapters.
In chapter 4 "Meaningful expression" Green inquires into the relationship between self-expression and speaker meaning; he'll show that the latter is the more general category, of which the former is a variant. Much self-expression isn't speaker meaning, since it doesn't require that we believe that which we express, nor any intention to express what we do. The three varieties of showing sketched out earlier amount to self-expression. The phylo- and ontogenetically primitive case of self-expression is the expression of emotion. Certain emotions are universal across cultures and their expression are beyond our voluntary control (e.g., Ekman on basic affect programs.) Green argues that we can perceive another's emotion in their behavioral or facial expression of it, due to the unshakable causal co-variances between the obtaining of the emotion and the observable pattern of expression of it. This is a form of signaling, which also consists in unshakable causal co-variances, which enable reliable telling of what's going on beneath the surface, or what might happen, given an observable cue.
In chapter 5 "Facial expression" Green draws in work in experiential psychology of facial expressions to supplement his account. He reviews Darwin's original theory about this, the neocultural approach, and the behavioral ecology approach. In chapter 6 "Convention and idiosyncrasy" Green extends his account from the expression of biologically primitive emotions to culturally variating expressions of diverse sorts of inner states. Many expressions are conventionalized, in the sense that these are arbitrary (another expression could've taken its place in expressing the sort of state that it does) and is normative in a culture. Using such an expression is like handicapping oneself in the evolutionary biology sense; one is now committed to behaving in a certain way that follows from the truth of what one has expressed (e.g., cutting off an ear to show one's love for another follows with the demand for one to know do all the things that are implied by that love).
Green proposes that we understand our ascription of propositional attitudes, with particular propositional content, to one another, from the lens of "mapping," whose paradigm may be that of measurement. Measuring something (e.g., that an eggplant is five pounds) need not imply that the eggplant possesses the property of being five pounds. Instead, there is an isomorphism between two systems that secures the truthfulness of such statements: one system is what's going down in the world itself, and the other system is the measurement system, which assigns items in the first system with values. There may be various, different measurement systems, which are all comparably isomorphic to the world, and so none is ultimately more truthful than the next. Similarly, we may think of attitude ascription as a matter of assigning attitudes (analogous to units of measurement) to people in certain states (analogous to the mass of objects). So we can be agnostic as to whether there really are only a handful of fundamental attitudes (e.g., belief and desire), and admit that in a given case, someone's attitude may be quite complex and yet we can capture certain aspects of it with our concepts regarding propositional attitudes. This also allows for that we can ascribe a propositional attitude without ascribing particular content. (I had some trouble figuring out how this fit in with the initial signaling model of communication; Green doesn't address this directly, but I guess it's a matter of that this mapping approach preserves the insight in the signaling model that there are lawful co-variations between some cue and something beyond that; in the case of attitude ascription, the thing beyond the cue of the facial expression or other expressive behavior is the sort of mental attitude one is in).
In chapter 7 "Expressive qualities" Green examines how we can show to one another our complex emotional states, which may also be characterized as how we've valued or evaluated a certain state of affairs (e.g., in fear, we've evaluated the object of fear as dangerous), through non-natural means (e.g., rather than primitive facial expressions, linguistic descriptions or even artwork). Green argues that there are certain dimensions that sensations across all of our sensory modalities may score upon: a sensation may be intense/mild, pleasant/unpleasant, dynamic/static. This is reflected in studies that indicate cross-cultural 'synesthesia' (e.g., Kiki is a spiky shape, while Lola is a round shape). Green thinks sensitivity to "congruences" regarding features along these dimensions between sensations from distinct modalities is intuitive, not requiring thought or inference. Moreover, emotions are sensitive to these dimensions. This allows for certain colors, smells, or any other sensation to express emotion. This explains how abstract visual art and music can express emotion, as well as how verbal description about how one sees the world when one is emotional can express emotion. (I was not sold on Green's analysis of artwork; I think his theory can be extended to account for the expressiveness of artwork in a way that is insightful, but he distorted his own work. He claims that artworks or art objects themselves have qualities of certain emotions (e.g., a chord is happy). This seems wrong, and stands in tension with his work in the previous chapter, showing that objects that are measured as having certain units don't literally possess properties regarding those units. Instead, it's intuitive to me that we should think of the experience we have, when engaging with an art object, as the basic item that is to be assessed for emotional qualities. This experience can be emotional, and the artwork serves a certain crucial role in enabling this experience).
As a whole, I'd highly recommend this work to anyone interested in issues regarding meaning, interpretation, and emotion from a mind-angle (e.g., the debate over whether we can perceive meaning, beyond sensory properties, i.e., the debate over 'cognitive penetration). I found chapters 1, 6, and 7 to be the most enriching, and think these could be read with only skimming the other chapters. My only complaint about this book is that it seems that Green could've proposed and defended his theory in a chapter or two's length, and much of this book consists in his summarizing details of other people's theories (either which he has drawn upon, which has inspired him, or which are rivals to his own accounts). These summaries are interesting, but I'd personally be more interested in diving deeper into the main points of Green's theory; for example, I am left with questions such as: what are the natures of the causal relations, which stand between perceptible cue and the meaning expressed, found in straight-up evolved signals in nature, in human emotional expression, in culturally-dependent communication in earnest, and in artwork? What are the comparisons between their natures? What are implications this has for the character of the "meaning" involved in each form of communication?
Let me briefly summarize the chapters. In chapter 1 "The significance of self-expression" Green introduces the philosophical puzzles that motivate his theory. First is the debate on how we can know one another's inner states on the basis of only observable behavior. Second is the lack of inquiry into expressive dimensions of communication by philosophers of language; only pragmatics sometimes goes into this. Third is the role of expressiveness in ethics and aesthetics; it's been relegated to being a matter of thinking ascribing the qualities of being good or bad to things in the world, but this distorts what human expressiveness as a phenomenon may be. Green also introduces the contours of his theory: he is inspired by theories in evolutionary biology about the use of signals in nature, as a consequence of natural selection. Bright colors on frogs may signal poisonousness to other species, and greater flamboyance of peacock feathers may signal fitness to peahens. Many of these signals cannot be faked, and those which can be faked often can only be so at the cost of extreme difficulty or self-handicapping.
We are to understand our human ways of expressing ourselves (e.g., crying, speaking, writing a poem, making music) as signals, albeit particularly elaborate and causally involved ones. This account stands in contrast to two paradigms. First is "the encoding model." On this, communication is a matter of encoding your ideas into a medium and sending it to me, which I decode and thereby access your meaning. A preliminary issue of this is we communicate much more than we say. On another paradigm "the inferential model" you provide me evidence of what inner state you have, and I'll draw inferences from this evidence to your inner state. A debate out there is whether one model should be understood as more fundamental than the other. Green argues that both models presuppose that the aim of communication is to make clear to others one's inner state; but this seems wrong. Communication may equally be characterized as having the aim of letting one another find out more about the world. Green proposes that the point of communication may be understood as showing how one sees something, or the aspects of something that are particularly salient to oneself. Green calls this the "extended senses model" (while he does not cite Bernard Williams, Williams's picture of communication is just this, and moreover he offers very interesting ideas to support it in Truth and Truthfulness). To put it a bit hyperbolically, by virtue of one's membership in a group, one gains access to all that others in the group see and feel. We'll communicate only that which we deem to be important for others to know, and we communicate in order to gain information about these important things. Green will use this extended senses model to elaborate upon the signaling model as found in evolutionary biology and arrive at a picture that captures the nature of the meaning found in human communication.
In chapter 2 "Expression delineated" Green defines self-expression as he uses it in this book, and distinguishes it from other related senses of expression. To put it briefly, self-expression is a matter of expressing one's inner state (e.g., emotional, cognitive, or experiential states), where expression either involves an intention to show this state, or does not but is a conventional or natural device for showing that state (where conventional and natural devices are to be defined in further chapters). In chapter 3 "Showing and meaning" Green reviews and criticizes Grice's theory of conversational implicature and his distinction between speaker meaning (a.k.a., non-natural meaning) and natural meaning. Green will replace it with his theory of "showing," of which there are three varieties: showing-that (whose object is a proposition), showing-O (where O is a perceptible object), and showing-how (which is a matter of illuminating certain aspects of a state of affairs). Grice is wrong, basically, because communication does not require the elaborate, nested sorts of intentions which he claims it does (i.e., the intention that in performing a communicative act the listener will recognize one's intention to perform this as a communicative act, along with one's intention to communicate the particular proposition that one does.) Instead, Green argues, communicative meaning should be seen as a matter of signaling and handicapping oneself (in the evolutionary biologist's sense), which he'll expand upon in further chapters.
In chapter 4 "Meaningful expression" Green inquires into the relationship between self-expression and speaker meaning; he'll show that the latter is the more general category, of which the former is a variant. Much self-expression isn't speaker meaning, since it doesn't require that we believe that which we express, nor any intention to express what we do. The three varieties of showing sketched out earlier amount to self-expression. The phylo- and ontogenetically primitive case of self-expression is the expression of emotion. Certain emotions are universal across cultures and their expression are beyond our voluntary control (e.g., Ekman on basic affect programs.) Green argues that we can perceive another's emotion in their behavioral or facial expression of it, due to the unshakable causal co-variances between the obtaining of the emotion and the observable pattern of expression of it. This is a form of signaling, which also consists in unshakable causal co-variances, which enable reliable telling of what's going on beneath the surface, or what might happen, given an observable cue.
In chapter 5 "Facial expression" Green draws in work in experiential psychology of facial expressions to supplement his account. He reviews Darwin's original theory about this, the neocultural approach, and the behavioral ecology approach. In chapter 6 "Convention and idiosyncrasy" Green extends his account from the expression of biologically primitive emotions to culturally variating expressions of diverse sorts of inner states. Many expressions are conventionalized, in the sense that these are arbitrary (another expression could've taken its place in expressing the sort of state that it does) and is normative in a culture. Using such an expression is like handicapping oneself in the evolutionary biology sense; one is now committed to behaving in a certain way that follows from the truth of what one has expressed (e.g., cutting off an ear to show one's love for another follows with the demand for one to know do all the things that are implied by that love).
Green proposes that we understand our ascription of propositional attitudes, with particular propositional content, to one another, from the lens of "mapping," whose paradigm may be that of measurement. Measuring something (e.g., that an eggplant is five pounds) need not imply that the eggplant possesses the property of being five pounds. Instead, there is an isomorphism between two systems that secures the truthfulness of such statements: one system is what's going down in the world itself, and the other system is the measurement system, which assigns items in the first system with values. There may be various, different measurement systems, which are all comparably isomorphic to the world, and so none is ultimately more truthful than the next. Similarly, we may think of attitude ascription as a matter of assigning attitudes (analogous to units of measurement) to people in certain states (analogous to the mass of objects). So we can be agnostic as to whether there really are only a handful of fundamental attitudes (e.g., belief and desire), and admit that in a given case, someone's attitude may be quite complex and yet we can capture certain aspects of it with our concepts regarding propositional attitudes. This also allows for that we can ascribe a propositional attitude without ascribing particular content. (I had some trouble figuring out how this fit in with the initial signaling model of communication; Green doesn't address this directly, but I guess it's a matter of that this mapping approach preserves the insight in the signaling model that there are lawful co-variations between some cue and something beyond that; in the case of attitude ascription, the thing beyond the cue of the facial expression or other expressive behavior is the sort of mental attitude one is in).
In chapter 7 "Expressive qualities" Green examines how we can show to one another our complex emotional states, which may also be characterized as how we've valued or evaluated a certain state of affairs (e.g., in fear, we've evaluated the object of fear as dangerous), through non-natural means (e.g., rather than primitive facial expressions, linguistic descriptions or even artwork). Green argues that there are certain dimensions that sensations across all of our sensory modalities may score upon: a sensation may be intense/mild, pleasant/unpleasant, dynamic/static. This is reflected in studies that indicate cross-cultural 'synesthesia' (e.g., Kiki is a spiky shape, while Lola is a round shape). Green thinks sensitivity to "congruences" regarding features along these dimensions between sensations from distinct modalities is intuitive, not requiring thought or inference. Moreover, emotions are sensitive to these dimensions. This allows for certain colors, smells, or any other sensation to express emotion. This explains how abstract visual art and music can express emotion, as well as how verbal description about how one sees the world when one is emotional can express emotion. (I was not sold on Green's analysis of artwork; I think his theory can be extended to account for the expressiveness of artwork in a way that is insightful, but he distorted his own work. He claims that artworks or art objects themselves have qualities of certain emotions (e.g., a chord is happy). This seems wrong, and stands in tension with his work in the previous chapter, showing that objects that are measured as having certain units don't literally possess properties regarding those units. Instead, it's intuitive to me that we should think of the experience we have, when engaging with an art object, as the basic item that is to be assessed for emotional qualities. This experience can be emotional, and the artwork serves a certain crucial role in enabling this experience).
As a whole, I'd highly recommend this work to anyone interested in issues regarding meaning, interpretation, and emotion from a mind-angle (e.g., the debate over whether we can perceive meaning, beyond sensory properties, i.e., the debate over 'cognitive penetration). I found chapters 1, 6, and 7 to be the most enriching, and think these could be read with only skimming the other chapters. My only complaint about this book is that it seems that Green could've proposed and defended his theory in a chapter or two's length, and much of this book consists in his summarizing details of other people's theories (either which he has drawn upon, which has inspired him, or which are rivals to his own accounts). These summaries are interesting, but I'd personally be more interested in diving deeper into the main points of Green's theory; for example, I am left with questions such as: what are the natures of the causal relations, which stand between perceptible cue and the meaning expressed, found in straight-up evolved signals in nature, in human emotional expression, in culturally-dependent communication in earnest, and in artwork? What are the comparisons between their natures? What are implications this has for the character of the "meaning" involved in each form of communication?
May 5, 2010
In this book, Green defends a number of theses in the philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, aesthetics, and psychology. Some of these theses are more interesting than others, some are better defended than others, and some are more accessible than others. In all, this book is interesting but not especially profound.
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